'it's not about rethinking some part or aspect of learning, it's about rethinking all of learning in this new technical and cultural context'

Thursday, 24 March 2016

What is 'Digital Wellbeing'?

This is the first of a few posts on digital wellbeing. The term is
one I coined - or at least brought into the education space - while I
was working on a new Digital
Capabillities framework for UK HE and FE (funded by Jisc) in
2015. Here, from the framework, is my definition.

There are diverse issues here, and more could be added. What links
them is an understanding that digital technology saturates our lives,
including our embodied lives. Our digital and physical identities are
constantly passing into one another through the devices we carry, the
data we shed, and the representations we capture and share. Our
bodies and brains, our knowledge of self and world, our working lives
and our personal relationships are all radically transformed in this
process. (Different subject areas have different ways of framing
these transformations, and the responsibilities of educators surely
include exploring what each knowledge / practice area adds to our
understanding of the digital revolution and outlining what kinds of
knowledgeable/capable selves can develop within that subject space.)

It was challenging to insert wellbeing into a framework of
individual capabilities, especially as I don't think being well is
only or mainly an individual responsibility. The design of learning
systems, the contents of digital curricula, the distribution of digital know-how, the business models of
digital development, the globalisation of digital labour... these are
issues with profound impact on our capacity to thrive, over which no
individual has control. But I think it's useful, and
potentially radical, to suggest that digital capability includes
self-care, and that self-care requires a critical awareness of how
digital technologies act on us and sometimes against us, as well as
allowing us to pursue our personal and collective aspirations in new
ways.

In using the terms 'capbility' and 'wellbeing' in a digital space I am consciously drawing on Martha Nussbaum's work on human development. Too rich to summarise here, her ideas are opened out nicely from an online review of her 2011 book Creating Capabilities: the human development approach.

My own work on the experiences
of digital students had already led me to question what it means
to thrive in a learning environment that is saturated with
digital technologies. Students have many concerns about the impact of
digital technology on their wellbeing, if we listen. This goes back
to my original definition of digital literacy for Jisc (2010):

those capabilities that enable an individual
to thrive (live, learn and work) in a digital society.

The link with Maslow is a reminder that digitally-mediated
learning still happens between human beings with human needs for
safety, nurture and care, for a sense of belonging and for personal
attention. Other writers such as Laura Czerniewicz, Catherine Cronin
and Gardner Campbell are raising the question of what love and care
for learners might look like in digital settings.

2. 'Digital identity and wellbeing' was included prominently in
the Irish National Forum's new (2015) framework
of digital skills for HE, after conversations between myself and
Jim Devine. You can see the final frameworks on pp. 35 and 36
of this report.

(c) allaboardhe.org

Elsewhere in the report there is a useful account of how
conceptions of digital literacy have evolved in the UK and Ireland,
with evidence of how widely used are the digital literacy development
pyramid (myself and Rhona Sharpe, 2009), the Jisc definition of
digital literacies (myself and Allison Littlejohn and Lou McGill,
2010) and the two frameworks I developed for Jisc in 2010 and 2015.

3. 'Digital wellbeing' is a theme for the 2016
Designs on e-Learning conference in New York City, with the call
for papers using a definition that closely follows mine in the Jisc
framework. I like the connection between 'design' and wellbeing,
because the two have often been antithetical in accounts of how
people learn. 'Learning design' has tended to treat learners as
rational users of a rational system or - worse - as components of the
system to be known through measurement and tracking. Here they are
treated as embodied, socially-connected and potentially vulnerable
human beings, whose learning involves investment and risk as well as
cognitive effort.

http://www.designsonelearning.net/call-for-papers/

4. I was invited to talk about the framework with universities
across Australia, which has led to the formation of a community
of practice in digital capability development. Digital wellbeing was
the area that elicited the most interest and excitement over there.
The term 'wellbeing' resonates immediately with professional staff -
librarians, careers advisers, learning skills professionals and other
student-facing specialists - who support learners in ways that are
not directly concerned with their subject knowledge or assessments.
But teaching in its traditional sense also involves care:
acknowledgement of everything learners bring to the experience of
learning, including their motivations, challenges, and prior
experiences, and an interest in their specific paths of development.

5. I was invited to contribute to a European framework on
developing Digitally
Capable Organisations which is being further developed into tools
for use in schools. I have more recently been invited to contribute
to a Commonwealth of Learning framework on Digital
Education Leadership (forthcoming 2016). In both cases I think my
contribution is to stress the responsibility that educational
organisations have for the wellbeing of all staff and learners as
they rely more on digital systems and introduce more digitally-based
practices.

6. I've also been approached by health education bodies to
consider developing a common framework. The wellbeing aspect of the
Jisc framework is particularly appealing to this sector.

7. I've been approached to work collaboratively with specialists
in e-safety and cyberbullying, who feel that 'digital wellbeing' is a
particularly helpful term to use in post-compulsory education. Adult
learners may not see themselves as needing support to be 'safe' or
'respectful' online, despite the fact that cyberbullying is an
increasing problem in universities. But they are interested in how to
live, learn and work effectively in digital spaces - for example to
understand different norms and cultures of online expression. They
also have legitimate concerns about how living, learning and working
relationships play out differently in those spaces.

One of the joys of working and publishing openly in a digital
community is to watch ideas taken up in diverse ways, taking on their
own lives and meaning different things to different people. As I've
argued elsewhere, terms such as 'digital wellbeing', 'digital
literacy' or 'digital capability', are useful only if they allow new
conversations to happen, and ultimately if they usher in new forms of
practice or critique. They belong to whoever can make use of them,
and once they are no longer useful they fall away (though if they
have had any traction, they leave changes behind them).

For me the important thing is for there to be an open dialogue,
recognising that ideas have a history and provenance, and that their
contexts of production and sharing deserve some attention.

Thanks for bearing with me. In further posts I'll look
at different aspects of digital wellbeing, depending on interest.

Great summary, Helen and as you pointed out the idea has been enthusiastically embraced by those of us involved in Ireland's national project: "All Aboard! Empowering and enabling staff and students to flourish in the digital age." After conversations with you on your work with JISC we felt that the term 'wellbeing' better articulated so many of the concepts and ideas that are (increasingly?) important in how we negotiate the digital world not just in terms of our own selves but the manner in which we interact with each other. Our original draft talked about 'digital citizenship' but wellbeing has so much more power, breadth and depth. Thank you, once again, for inspiring our work.

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